The Signs of Life Test
Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Before pouring budget into a new ad platform, run a deliberately small test to see if there is any 'sign of life' — a positive signal that the platform can reach and convert your users. Crucially, a sign of life is a trigger to pause and build the right campaign, not a green light to scale at full speed. The test is anchored to your own first-party data via lookalike audiences so the signal is meaningful even on a limited budget.
Origin
Timothy Davis credits the phrase to his current director at Shopify. The lookalike-ladder mechanic is standard Meta functionality he has systematized.
Core principles
- 01A small signal is enough to justify building a proper campaign — you don't need to prove the whole channel at once
- 02Start from your existing customers, not cold targeting, so the earliest signal is as high-fidelity as possible
- 03Signs of life means slow down and get the creative/messaging right, not accelerate to 100mph
- 04Budget, not statistical purity, usually sets how long a test runs — get the data you can afford and extrapolate
How to run it
- 1
Load your own customer data into the platform
Take your existing customer base and upload it to build lookalike audiences. Your own data is the highest-fidelity starting point because the lookalikes are tied directly to real customer behavior.
Pro tip Use this even when a platform is brand new and you have no playbook — your first-party seed still gives the algorithm something real to match against.
- 2
Build a lookalike ladder of ad sets
On Meta, build separate ad sets at increasing lookalike breadth: a 1% (most tightly correlated to your customers), a 2-4%, a 5-7%, and an 8%+. The smaller the percentage, the closer the audience matches your existing customers.
Pro tip If budget is tight, just run the 1% first — it is so tied to your customer base that a positive signal there is enough to justify building the campaign.
Watch out The 8%+ tier usually does not work, but occasionally does — treat it as a cheap flyer, not a core bet.
- 3
Read the signal, then stop
If the 1% (or tighter tiers) return a positive signal, you now have what you need. Do not immediately scale. Ask whether you have the right creative, campaign structure, and messaging for that platform's specific user mindset first.
Watch out Creative and messaging that worked on Meta often fail on TikTok — each platform is a different user experience, so do not blindly port assets across.
- 4
Size the opportunity for finance
Use the test's impression share, reach, click-through rate and conversion rate to build a projected return at higher spend, so you can go to finance with 'we put $X in and got Y; at $10k we expect Z'.
Pro tip Bring your Google/Meta platform partners into this sizing — they will help build the projection.
In the wild
Davis consulted for Hair Story, which was doing well on Google Shopping. Looking at their analytics he saw meta and a then-very-new TikTok already sending users. They ran a small Meta test with customer testimonials to build a retargeting funnel, and learned that creative working on Meta was missing the mark on TikTok.
→ Results from turning up the already-present channels were described as 'pretty exponential', though exact numbers weren't recalled.
Common mistakes
Treating a sign of life as permission to floor it
Seeing an early signal and immediately going 'Go Run 100 miles an hour' skips the step of getting the right creative, campaign and messaging for that platform, which wastes the budget you just unlocked.
Porting winning creative across platforms unchanged
Each platform has a different user mindset; assets that convert on Meta can flop on TikTok because the user experience and intent differ.
Is it for you?
Best for
Startups and growth marketers exploring a new paid channel on a limited budget who need cheap evidence before committing spend
Not ideal for
Companies without product-market fit or the operational ability to convert (e.g. missing local currency) — the test will just return low conversion and annoy users
From the transcript
“there's a saying that um my current director likes to use which is Signs of Life you can always do a very very small test…”
“the number one thing I tell people all the time is use your own data start with your own data”
“what I tend to do is build ad sets uh one at 1% because we know that one's going to be highly correlated to what…”
From the episode
The ultimate guide to performance marketing
Timothy Davis (Shopify)